SIMS 247 Assignment 4 (Midterm Project)

Last modified 3/11/98.

Update on timing of assignments

Assignment 4 will be the midterm project. The due date for the project will be April 9. The requirements for the final project will be distributed April 2. Presentations on the final projects will still be due the week of May 5 and project reports will be due May 14. There will still probably be one or two more smaller homework assignments.

Most likely I will be adding to this assignment description, especially more ideas for projects as they are discussed.

Get Familiar with Pad++

Run the Pad++ demos available from the SIMS computers at Programs\Research & Analysis\Data Visualization .
You can also download this from the web and install it on your own computer.

(The demos menu is on the top righthand side of the Pad++ title bar, next to Help.)

Be sure to try out the pan and zoom facilities.

Use the editing facility to create objects. Experiment with creating portals and hyperlinks.

Create a Zoomable Interface Object

Choose one of the following Pad++ mini-projects. For whichever you choose, I'd like you to turn in several things:

By March 12, describe your goals (what you are going to attempt to do and the role pan+zoom should play in it). Send this to me in email.
By April 2, have at least two other students try out what you've done and give you feedback. This can be done informally, but keep a record of their feedback (maybe use a web form) for me to see. Incorporate whichever of their suggestions are both doable in the given timeframe and make sense to you.
For the report due April 9:
- Make the resulting Pad++ file(s) available for me to run
- Include another copy of your original goals
- Describe how you did the project, including some screen shots
- Include a report on the feedback you recieved and how you responded
- Assess your results in terms of:
  - to what extent you achieved your goals
  - how useful the pan+zoom facility is (or is not) for the kind of information you are trying to show
  - how useful PadDraw or the tcl interface was for your purposes

Semantic Zooming

Use Semantic Zooming or Goal-Directed Zooming (Woodruff) to provide an more informative interface than might be possible without it. The Bederson et al. paper gives an example of semantic zooming on a digital clock. This project would have to be something more complex than this. Others have discussed viewing a city, first as an overview and then each building in more detail (as done in SimCity). Still another idea is viewing a tree, from far away, then at the level of bark, then at the level of cells, then DNA, then atoms.

However, the focus in this course is on viewing more abstract information. This might include the contents of a database or some hierarchical information. One idea is to zoom on a tree or network in which nodes, when viewed closer up, show more detailed information, and smaller networks are embedded within nodes of larger networks. Another idea is to make the contents of a database more understandable.

A difficulty with zooming on abstract information is that there is no obvious physical layout metaphor to use and so the layout can be meaningless. For example, one can get lost using Pad++ to navigate slides for a long talk.

Multi-scale Views of a Timeline

Using the example from Bederson et al. 98 as inspiration, use pan-and-zoom to create an innovative view on a timeline. I recommend using the timeline in the Schriver book as a source of material, perhaps incorporating documents or images that you find elsewhere as well. I wouldn't expect you to incorporate the entire timeline, but a fair portion of it, and certainly enough to get the main ideas across. You are free to use some other topic for a timeline if you like.

Consider combining the ideas on how to view the timeline from Bederson et al. 98 with ideas from the Perspective Wall (discussed in Leung and Apperley and Robertson et al.). If you think it is a good idea, try to implement both ideas, and if you think it is not a good idea, say why not.

Create a New Filter

Create a new magic lens-like filter for Pad++. [It looks to me like you can do this in a pretty straightforward way using the tcl scripting interface. (It seems to need to make use of the -visiblelayers features.) It might be possible to do this in PadDraw but would probably not be easy. I recommend this choice only for people who have already written tcl/Tk programs.] Be sure to describe why you think this filter might be useful.

Your Choice

If you have something else you'd like to do instead, please discuss this with me.